James Hall

Scholar on Lincoln's slaying

James Hall was praised as a man who knew more about the assassination `than anyone who ever lived, except those personally involved in it'

March 06, 2007|By The Washington Post

James Hall, one of the most authoritative scholars on the Abraham Lincoln assassination, died of aspiration pneumonia Feb. 26 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 94.

Mr. Hall, with William Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy, wrote "Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln," a 1988 book that detailed Confederate plans to kidnap and assassinate the president.

Although he earned his living as director of the wage and hour division of government contracts in the Labor Department, Mr. Hall devoted his spare time and the years after his 1972 retirement to research and analysis of the Lincoln assassination.

He helped train guides at the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Md., and 30 years ago helped the museum set up its popular tours of the route that John Wilkes Booth took after shooting Lincoln. The museum named its research center for Mr. Hall.

"He has inspired and assisted many of the current scholars in the field with his intense and critical research techniques and his willingness to share his knowledge with others," according to the Surratt House Museum Web site.

Mr. Hall, born in Afton, Okla., wrote numerous magazine articles, pamphlets and papers on the topic, and "Come Retribution," his only book, won an award from the National Intelligence Study Center as the best book on intelligence in 1988.

He loved investigative and detective work, his family said.

"When he was a child, he remembered talk from his grandparents and great-grandparents about the Civil War and Lincoln," said Larry Emlich, a nephew whom Mr. Hall and his wife raised until he was 7 years old. "It just instilled an interest in him. There were so many rumors about Booth--[just as] James Dean still lives and Elvis is pumping gas somewhere."

"It's a hot subject," Mr. Hall told The Post. "It's like the Kennedy assassination. There's a whole library of books on it and all sorts of theories."

He graduated from Northeastern State College in Tahlequah, Okla., and worked as a history teacher before joining the Labor Department in 1941.

With Ford's Theatre historian Michael Maione, he determined that in the last 11 months of Booth's life, the actor-assassin had lost his savings in an oil well scheme and had not earned a penny from acting.

"We set out to explore the finances of Booth," Mr. Hall said. "We followed the money trail."

Called the specialist's specialist on the Lincoln assassination, he knew more about it "than anyone who ever lived, except those personally involved in it," Ford's Theatre historian William Hanchett once said.